“No Middle Flight”: The Audacity of Paradise Lost

This article tackles the source and context of John Milton’s prophetic inspiration and delves into an analysis of the poem’s literary echoes, from Homer and Virgil, to medieval and renaissance literature, before dwelling on the figure of Satan and the author’s deliberate strategy of creating a peculiar poetic diction. The concern with this foundational seventeenth-century poetic text, as well as the focus on poiesis as the creative “coming into being” of an artistic form reflect Mihaela Irimia’s academic pursuits not only in terms of the shaping of a cultural paradigm, but also with respect to the archeological endeavor of revealing the substrata of a literary text.